CULTURE-CANADA: Aboriginal Languages in Danger of Dying

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mark Bourrie

OTTAWA, Jan 4 1999 (IPS) - Most of Canada’s aboriginal languages will die out in the next century unless indigenous communities work harder to protect them, a newly-released study shows

In 1996, only 20 per cent of Canada’s aboriginal children under five years of age had an indigenous mother tongue, according to the study, conducted by the Canadian government using census data. The vast majority of aboriginal people now learn English as their first language, the study says.

The study shows that only 300,000 of Canada’s 1.5 million aboriginal people routinely speak an indigenous language. The trend toward linguistic assimilation has intensified in the last half of this century as indigenous people leave isolated, impoverished and bleak reserves to live in cities.

It is mainly in remote parts of Canada, where there are few radio and television stations, that indigenous languages have survived. With more sophisticated communications systems, such as inexpensive satellite receivers, being set up in isolated communities, the last barriers to the spread of English are being broken down, the study says.

“Language is one of the main tools of handing down a world view and a culture from one generation to another,” says Marie- Francoise Guedon, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Ottawa.

“There’s no hope that these societies can maintain their oral histories and their traditions if their languages become extinct,” she says. “They’re more than just a way of speaking. They contain all of the cultural nuances that make one group of people different from another.”

A few indigenous languages have thrived in isolated northern and eastern parts of Quebec, where the few non-indigenous settlers speak French. Quebec’s French is believed to act as a sort of buffer between indigenous people and the predominant English- speaking culture of North America.

One of these surviving languages is Attikamek. Spoken by only 4,000 people, it is being passed on to a new generation who are rarely exposed to North American culture. Fully 97 per cent of people who learned Attikamek as children continue to use it at home. The average age of Attikamek-speakers is 21.5 years, proof that that the language is used by Attikamek children.

The main indigenous language of remote tundra regions of north- eastern Quebec is also in excellent health. Variously called Montagnais, Naskapi and Innu, it is spoken by more than 9,000 people in Quebec and Labrador. As with Attikamek, more than 90 per cent of mother-tongue speakers still use it in their homes.

The Haida of the Pacific Northwest, by contrast, face the loss of their language within the next few decades if the trends in their homeland of the Queen Charlotte Islands continue. The average age of Haida speakers is almost 65.

And, says the study, there are now fewer than 20 speakers of Abenaki, the language of a people who lived in the Appalachian Mountains along the border between Quebec and New England.

The largest aboriginal language in Canada is Cree, which is the mother tongue of more than 87,500 people. Of those, 72 per cent (about 63,000) continue to use it at home. Across the country, the total number of Cree speakers appears to have grown by more than 10,000 since the 1991 census.

In Quebec, nearly 11,000 people have Cree as a mother tongue. The rate at which they continue to speak it is significantly higher than the rate in some other provinces, where Cree has been eroded by English.

Cree is spoken by people living in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Few roads link the region to the rest of Canada, and communities subsist mainly by hunting and fishing.

The Cree have their own alphabet, newspapers, radio stations, and a government infrastructure partly financed from a large cash settlement for land purchased by the Quebec government in the 1970s for a massive hydro-electric project.

Aboriginal groups point to the Crees as proof that indigenous languages can survive if communities have the financial base to develop their own media and school system. They also look to the experiences of speakers of Inuktitut, the second largest of all aboriginal tongues in Canada and the language of the Innuit, formerly known as Eskimos.

In the western regions of the Arctic, fewer than half of the people who learned Inuktitut as children still speak it at home. But in the eastern Arctic and especially northern Quebec, the retention rate is well over 80 per cent.

Inuktituk community leaders in the Eastern Arctic have virtual political sovereignty, with their own courts and a new legislature for their territory of Nunavut. Inuktitut radio and television stations broadcast into remote Innuit communities, and the language is used in the region’s schools.

Mark Fettes, an Ottawa-based consultant on language policy, says in many communities there is an indigenous renaissance, including a growth in concern about aboriginal languages.

“All over the place,” says Fettes, “communities are starting up school and pre-school programmes in indigenous languages. Language issues are implicated in the present discussions about the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights.”

Some indigenous groups refused to take part in the study.

Statistics Canada was unable to come up with an accurate measure for the use of Mohawk and other Iroquoian languages in 1996. Most Iroquois traditionalists refuse to take part in censuses, on the grounds that they owe allegiance to their own nations, not to Canada or the United States.